Black Myth: Wukong Devs Told Streamers to Avoid Politics in Their Playthroughs. It Backfired
The Chinese studio granted early access on the condition that topics like “feminist propaganda” and “Covid-19” go unmentioned. What followed is the Streisand effect in full force.
“I feel that it only served to bring more attention on Game Science’s culture of sexism,” linktothepabst says. “All they had to do was let the game speak for itself, but it came off, to me, like an own goal, effectively stoking the flames between the people who were using this game as weapon against ‘wokeness in games’ and those who can level-headedly either enjoy the game and criticize GS or just ignore the game altogether.”
It’s the Streisand effect in full force: Try to hide something, and it becomes all the more visible. “Nobody was going to bring up Chinese politics unprompted,” Zhong says, “but the topic was there as soon as they released those guidelines.”
China has a weird approach to misogyny. Women are both empowered and belittled, and it's all over the media. Anybody who's read the three body problem trilogy (especially book 3) can attest to this.
Especially book 3?? I stopped reading after the second because it was too much, it gets worse? wtf
Yes, so much worse, directed at both men for not being manly enough and women for being... well, not manly men.
I wrote off the novel when the author said that the Chinese people weren't ready for democracy
What gets worse?
The video series tried so hard to downplay that aspect of the books, but it felt like their overall plan was to plaster over & repaint the stains... until the whole thing was rotted through and the mask just slid right off. 😬
Don't bother with video series.
Read the content to enjoy what value exists, and criticize what issues exist. Reading is not voting or aligning, it's observing.
I agree, but with a caveat. Pirate things from people who publicly espouse shitty views. Purchasing it is justifying it. JK Rowling has explicitly said she feels more empowered to be awful because people keep buying Harry Potter stuff.
Fandom is endorsement; the HP IP has become a huge anti-trans flag.
Every time people invoke it, they wave that flag some more, and mark it as an acceptable thing to stand under.
Let it die, both financially and culturally.
We're talking about pirating books? Nah, go to a library. They need the numbers to get funding.
Arr matey.
All of what you said is true, and I mildly regret giving the video series a chance, NGL. Also, that last bit doesn't really jive with totalitarian states like PRC's China. 😶
Huh? What do you mean about the last bit
Oh, well, fuckem, why would I consider them?
I don't think about totalitarian states at all, outside of specific conversations about em
Because, that's where the author is from? 😶
That's fair but my original comment in thread was my personal opinion on consuming written content.
I'm not sure you're grasping the weight of the fact that such a work of post-hunanism fiction even made it out of China at all, given the government's centuries-long tradition of heavily-filtering "art" in every form...
(edit: I'm leaving the misspelling in for the stupid pun.)
No, I agree, that's of interest. But my comment was my opinion about how the rest of us can consume written media.
Oh, I didn't know that you were excluding 1.4B people in the general statement. My bad. 😅
I read the whole series and somehow missed this, I did chalk up a lot of things to "must be a chinese cultural thing", like the whole idea of all nations actually working together or globally banning "escapism" and just suspended my disbelief, so maybe I glossed over that bit as well. Is there a good article that dives into this?
E: Found this article, that goes into it as well as other issues, well worth a read
I think they're doing this on purpose at this point. Wielding Streisand effect to the fullest of its potential to promote their game.
It backfired at that with me. I had my guard up when it popped up on my Steam queue, so even though I was curious about the game, it was a let's see that it's about and then move on for me.
In addition to the ccp stuff, it uses denuvo, so I wouldn't have bought it anyways, so maybe it didn't make that much of a difference. Though who knows, maybe I only noticed that because my guard was up; sometimes I forget to check.
Such a weird move to be like "we've picked a side in the culture wars, by the way don't talk politics about us"
Except they didn't really pick a side - they got attacked and responded in a way that was bad for PR but honestly kinda predictable. It all got sparked off by them getting a bad review that was mostly positive but penalized the Chinese game heavily inspired by a piece of classic Chinese literature (Journey to the West) for not being diverse enough (aka not featuring many women and no black people), 6/10. What they did since (the rules for streamers seeking a key) has been a (badly chosen) reaction to that.
Unless having a game heavily inspired by a piece of classical literature that doesn't express the racial and gender diversity of modern LA is itself choosing a side?
There's a respectful way to do it, and they chose the heavy handed approach, and to act like they have a chip on their shoulder. If they wanted to make that point and head off any politicization, they could have lead with a simple something like "this game is highly committed to its source material, and the creative choices are solely focused on textual authenticity and fun gameplay. We value any feedback about political topics, but we respectfully wish that our game be judged purely on its creative aims", just as a very rough first draft. There's no need to take a contentious tone and then demand silence. It's completely high handed, and practically demands a reaction.
That doesn't really work either, see pre release coverage for Deliverance: Kingdom Come and aside from a few articles during early crowdfunding about how they were naughty bad people for not having black people in a game set in a few square kilometers of 15th century Bohemia and having a "female character DLC" (the game has a fixed protagonist and the DLC lets you play from the perspective of another character, framed as her telling the MC about how she managed to escape the attack on their village). After the articles about them being racist and sexist for that, there was basically radio silence until it launched and was too big a deal to ignore.
They shouldn't have taken that lying down, but at some point you do have to hope that people can tell who's bullshitting. If your work is genuine and you stand by it in the face of criticism, the criticism just gets people talking about you in a positive way - look at how game journalists covered BG3.
People complain like hell when you go the opposite direction and pump up the diversity for its own sake too. That's what sucks about culture wars, nobody's on the same page anymore. You can do either thing in a good way, but people can tell when it comes from an ethos and not just corporate interests.
Art in general comes with this struggle. Not even in a video game are you going to be able to be all things to all people without completely diluting your creative work. That's part of why I really worry about bigger budgets in games, that higher investment comes with a lot of risk averse executives who aren't going to be as happy with output that doesn't hit every segment of the market. You have to be willing to take risks to make anything that has value to anyone other than shareholders.
CCP brainrot goes deep
To the mod who removed my comment.
There was absolutely 0 sexism in that comment. You deleted it, stating sexism and that it broke rule 1, which it absolutely did not. I was very civil in disproving the claims the article presents, meanwhile I still have comments responding to my comment implying that I'm gay and a slave for saying it, but those don't break rule 1?
You've used your moderation to help the spread of misinformation, which is against rule 8.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
If you have a question about a moderation decision, you can msg any member of the moderation team for review/explanation. I have reviewed the removed comment and found that it was not removed in error. If anything, it should also have been removed for misinformation as well.
In the future, any comments about individual moderation actions that are not addressed to the mod team through an appropriate channel will be removed. This is to avoid derailing legitimate, topical conversations.
Typical mod on an ego trip.
If it's the mod I think it is, prepare for a 30d ban ...
Based on their comments in this thread they may have earned that much of a ban
Could you clarify what comments I made that broke any rules, or were even slightly unpleasant?
Easiest to list which ones weren't. You're escalated replies aren't helping you either
You're dodging. Just say one then.
All of them then. Amazing you haven't been banned for how uncivil you are
You didn't even read them, did you?
I did and no I'm not picking them apart to point out what all was rule breaking, especially as I'm not a mod
No, but you made a claim that me being banned would be justified based on what you saw, so it is only fair that you back that claim. I provided sources for all of mine.
"Leave me alone after I talked shit about you"
No.
I haven’t been banned as of this comment, but that sounds like a lovely person.
I get people downvoting. It contradicted lot of beliefs, but removal was not justified.
I did get banned from PleasantPolitics@slrpnk.net by their bot that bans purely based on how many downvotes you have.
Oh great mod abuse is happening here as well?
Check the user's modlog and judge for yourself.
I'm not afraid to show it. I firmly believe nothing I said broke any rules, and I've provided sources of the arguments in the subcomments too.
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=545695
How could it not happen anywhere where mods are? It is in the nature of the thing.
Mod abuse is universal. Power corrupts.
Every instance has its bias. Mods squash deviation from their consensus.
What is the purpose of moderating if not enforcing your personal opinion on everyone
It happens everywhere. Just Jannies doing janny things. Sweep it up, janny!
Just keep in mind: he does it for free
That makes it worse
That's the point
No it did not. Wukong is a bestseller: https://lemmy.ml/post/19657183
https://steamdb.info/app/2358720/charts/
Yeah. It clearly killed their sales.
I'm sure the Game Science folks are re-evaluating their life choices and wondering where they went wrong.
When the story broke, my wife and I discussed it a bit, and I mentioned that I hadn't even heard of the game before all this.
If it was deliberate marketing, it was really well done.
Could be.
A plan like that would be pretty risky. I suspect they just didn't think it through much. I think their sales are mostly driven by people who didn't care about anything besides a AAA Monkey King game.
Most people in the US have no idea how much pent up demand there was for this game. Monkey King is an insanely popular character. Imagine if Star Wars was a 500 year old franchise and nobody had ever made a decent video game about it. All your life you grow up with weird foreign characters you've never heard of and then someone comes along and says, "We're going to make it and we're pulling out all the stops on the graphics."
If the developers did anything short of kicking puppies in public, people would still line up to throw money at them.
Enslaved was a great game based off Journey to the West. Unfortunately it sold poorly.
I wonder if Game Science meant avoid politics like "western identity politics" or "critique of the CCP"? Perhaps both?
No idea.
It's hard to tell what their sales would have been had they left those terms out.
Most studios can only dream of having their marketing backfire that successfully.
::: spoiler Wired Magazine - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report) Information for Wired Magazine:
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So much, they have 2 million concurrent players.
Someone here is salty because game is successful. I guess this is related to the IGN article
I don't think this post said anything about 'The Game' backfiring.
It specifically calls out that streamers spoke about exactly what they didn't want spoken. That's what the Streisand Effect is.
Congratulations to Game Science for a good game, but it's business as usual for the C-Suite being completely disconnected to how the social world works.
I would have thought that it was a "CCP interests" boilerplate. That is to say, maybe game science were just following what instructions they needed to by the CCP? It just seems so Chinese government to mention COVID-19 when this game has nothing to do with that.
I have yet to watch a video where anything mentioned in this "article" was brought up. The only place I have seen any of this is on Lemmy (and I would assume other social media if I used it), and I saw people questioning if this list of topics even went out to anyone.
This article seems like more "both sides" story telling trying to get clicks from the "woke" pitchfork brigade trying to find more things to clutch their pearls about.
Edit - Just to make my position clear. I 100% believe that the accusations against those in charge at Game Science, and since I do not easily separate the art from the artist I have not bought the game. My comments above were in regards to this click bait article bringing nothing new and taking a "both sides" approach to a topic that was thoroughly covered over a week ago when the game released. As an article like this that is void of details, and adds nothing new to the discourse, is posted for the sole purpose of getting clicks from the upset toxic anti-woke crowd. I have also yet to watch a video where any of this has even gotten a mention beyond an acknowledgement from one creator that there was a "controversy" surrounding the game. I have also not seen a US content creator who got an early access copy, so none of them would have gotten this "do/don't" list to begin with. I have also not read any reporting on if this actually went to everyone from the studio itself, or if whatever PR company was handling each region for release was the one creating/sending out this list.
If anyone actually cares, the IGN article actually covered the issues with this studio and the culture of China as a whole.
Nothing you say is ever worth paying attention to if you use phrases like this
give the document a read yourself
https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1aKlZvxWxbPOzldSUdc6CaHmoy80Fl7W_wQt-Ex-vl0k/mobilebasic?pli=1
Published by https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YVuo-oqw2EU
https://videogames.si.com/news/black-myth-wukong-streamers-feminist-propaganda
Thanks for the additional sources! And for the discipline.
I have read that "document", how does that change anything I said? Have you not seen this toxic "anti-woke" bile that has been popping up for every new game release now? Like we get that they hate woman, are super racist, and think that being gay or trans makes people not human, but I think they are a minority that should go back to living in the swap.
And my comment getting a -40 makes me sad for the future if that many people are choosing to side with hate and discrimination.